As Silverlight versions go it is quite impressive and pretty much a complete solution now including desktop save support and full set of tools for RIA development (early versions were only Javascript or had limited controls libraries).

Granted there are lots of years of gain that Flash has on Silverlight but the path that Silverlight it following leads right to Flash. Hopefully this will lead to more innovation on both sides (they might need it with Google Wave pushing html5 <canvas>).

One very nice element of Silverlight since it has been released at verison 1.0 is the HD video support. It has gotten better with each release. This release has smooth streaming support that is pretty impressive for web video.

Roy Schestowitz plays the flip side and calls this a ‘silver-lie’ released and has lots to say about the Silverlight 3 release and even using Big Buck Bunny to demo it. He states a true fact that up til now lots of companies have abandoned Silverlight in favor of Flash (mlb, nyt etc). It is still used at Netflix but that has an XBOX deal to play Netflixon xbox360.

Flash didn’t really get good until version 4. Typically software is a real version at version 3, that is when most software has the goals and ambitions of 1.0 fully complete and integrated. We shall see how things play out but I still think Silverlight has a long way to go in winning over developers, myself included, but competition is never a bad thing when you are wanting to see innovation.

Making games that integrate content from the web is especially required these days. It is a difficult thing to do within the 3d render because of all the plugins, styling etc that needs to be rendered on a 3d surface. Well Torque3D has a killer feature in that it supports entirely full features browser render on a 3d surface. So now you can integrate html content, flash video etc in your game easily.

You can play content in flash player content easily and have stripped down html but it is limited, you can play videos and have content in Unity3d but it is limited, even larger engines like Unreal 3 have difficulty handling flash and html content. If this is a good implementation Torque3D has a killer feature on their hands! Flash is commonly used as user interface elements and content within games but it can be challenging. This is pretty exciting if it works as advertised. Think of how cool all the little consoles, mini-games and controls in 3d games could be in flash easily.

Here is a video with more information on Silverlight 3 Beta features that are matches of the latest Flash killer features in pixel shaders, 3d planes (ability to create pseudo-3d engines like papervision3d), local saving, pixel operations/bitmap handling, local messaging (silverlight to silverlight – like localconnection), out of browser desktop running ability of SL3, SEO and search indexing capabilities / deep linking navigation and more.

Video of the features of SL3 Beta, Demos, at a Slow Pace from #mix09

A few points after the video and taking a tour of the features.

The pixel shaders are written in HLSL (shader 2), however they are compiled to byte code and do not currently use the gpu for rendering. While the pixel shaders are very cool and the language to write them is standard pretty much for shaders in HLSL shader model 2 DirectX-based (the other is GLSL OpenGL based) they have not allowed this byte code to run on the GPU… yet. Here Flash and Pixel Bender actually are ahead there.

Although there are 3d planes which is very exciting, no good pseudo 3d engine exists yet matching the 3 in flash (papervision3d, away3d, sandy). When SL3 comes out I am sure we will see a few emerge or build them ourselves because this iteration of SL3 looks pretty fun.

Pixel based operations will be a huge advancement much like it was in earlier flash versions as it adds some demo scene type abilities and experiments with pixels that are fun. This also lends to doing cool things like shaders, effects, AR, face recognition, motion detection etc.

Effects like Blur and Drop shadow are good and the ability to add custom ones, great. However currently they are pretty performance intensive. They are also in Flash but there needs to be some refinement in SL3 effects before launch.

Desktop runnable apps in out of browser will be nice and this is a direct compete with Adobe AIR which was a surprise.

Although there are some great features in SL3 beta, it is still not done and it is still missing some key components that Flash has which make it very attractive in the interactive space.

Camera and Microphone support - Macromedia hired one of the smartest dudes around in Jeremy Allaire back in flash 6 days to help add support for Flash Communication Server (Flash Media Server now) Camer and Microphone support. One of the best R&D periods at Macromedia. SL needs this soon.

Printing support – what was long a problem in Flash is so in SL, there is no good printing support

No GPU usage for Pixel Effects/Shaders – (neither flash nor silverlight support hardware accelerated shaders in PixelEffects/Pixelbender – Pixel Effects/Shaders need GPU support (see Kevin Goldsmith’s article on GPU mixed with CPU and how this may or may not be good. However processors are speeding up and multi-core helps software rendering, the quality of GPU is well beyond what software rendering can deliver for a few years to come at least while architecture advances, probably more like 5-10 years.

No UDP plans yet - Adobe has RTMFP, SL sockets has no public plans for adding UDP that I have seen

No Alpha Channel in Video - You can do this with a shader though but not supported by default.

Silverlight 3 Video

Flash has the upperhand in video and probably will still even though SL3 has H.264. Flash added this at the same time and though they still have FLV which revolutionized web video they are now much broader in support in video than SL3. Silverlight has H.264 and VC1 support (their own FLV like codec). Still pretty cool a couple years ago there was no HD on the web now everyone has it in H.264 video support.

Currently nothing innovative, mainly catchup still, but here are some options

Silverlight 3 beta and the video below the features and highlights will look very similar to flash and flash community advancements over the last couple years. There is no innovation just yet.

But where that could happen is in socket support with UDP. Flash has moved on this in RTMFP and the beginning of larger scale networking support with UDP with samples like stratus. This is a huge differentiating feature for what I think will be game changer on the web (it already is on desktop mmos) in real-time or closer to real-time support for larger sets of users in online games like MMOs or virtual communities, even tools to make request based real-time sites like micro-blogging faster and able to handle more users (right now it is very linear if users get many followers, UDP will allow a better distributed framework for messaging).

Local Storage

Silverlight and Unity3D all need this, Flash could use better support for this. Local saving of a files for cache beyond the internet cache and greater than the 1MB/25MB limits of SL3 IsolatedStorage. This is an issue when you are making large scale games in that you need to save lots of assets to a client but to make it economical you want ot save more than the default internet cache amount. Flash Shared Object (Local) allow you to do this somewhat but it would be great to have a way to just download files for cache (upon user agreement) to store assets in bulk of allowable types (images, video, models, bundles) to the file system.

Hardware rendering for 3d support and UDP support will put Flash and SL3 on par with the killer Unity3D kit for making online web games and other activex/plugins like instantaction that allow you to do these things already.

The one thing SL has over Flash

Flash and Flex are great. But there is this massive division in the community and marketing of Flash. Silverlight is entirely unified and this has much to do with starting clean at a time that interactive development is heading more into a technology and developers control. Flash and Flex need to bring it together. AS3 has been out long enough that the people with skills have hopped on and taken it to a new level, mainly from programmers. If Adobe created a version of Flash that was a new IDE and consolidated Flex and Flash into just Flash, made the IDE as powerful as FDT or FlashDevelop3 there could be hope to bring the platform together. I understand they had to work it in slowly because it was a designers platform really (even though coders still pushed the limits in games and apps built on it) so they had to tip toe carefully on this to not alienate people. But now I think the division is a serious problem with the platform and must be addressed, noone expected Silverlight to be this quick on at least SL3 features. And even though the initial approach might have been bad as SL1 was a huge letdown, Microsoft does not give up and you can see in the XBOX360 and DirectX that they are very pursuant. DirectX really didn’t become huge until version 7 so these guys won’t relent.

I am not a huge fan of using the proprietary tools. Even in Flash I use as much open source as I can even though the player is locked, but Moonlight is something that trails Silverlight development and is a very unique thing in both open source and cross platform/multiplatform development. It is a clear relationship and aims to make Silverlight run on multiplatform mono including Linux. This could win out in the end who knows.

I have been really busy this week just delving into all them and hope to start making more cool and useful projects in them. The best part is right now is great to be an interactive or game developer as all major software companies and markets are focused on retaining good developers. I don’t’ recall a time other than the beginning the the web virtual land rush that has so many options and markets that skilled developers and designers can choose from. Good times.

Adobe will essentially open up the RTMP protocol officially. RTMP has been used in other tools such as Red5 and haXe video for some time now. But officially having it open will make it possible for more products built on it. I am sure that most of this is to combat silverlight and to gain more video users that can play flash formats. RTMP spec will be posted here when ready.

RTMP provides an enhanced and efficient way to deliver rich content. Developers and companies will have free and open access to the documented RTMP specification to help enable unparalleled delivery of video, audio and data in the open AMF, SWF, FLV and F4V formats compatible with Adobe Flash Player.

Adobe has also been working on more real-time protocol tools based on UDP instead of TCP (which RTMP is based) that fall under RTMFP using ordered UDP that will be interesting to watch evolve. Stratus is so far a sample of what is to come there.The UDP based real-time tools will be able to beat the capabilities of TCP based real-time tools when using authoritative servers.

But with the RTMP announcement, multiuser and video applications should thrive even more with an open RTMP spec.

Looks like they maybe had a contribution for this, so do it where you can.

This is something we’ve been wanting to provide for a while, and the YouTube API team greatly appreciates the work of developer Matthew Richmond of The Chopping Block for making it happen. Thanks Matthew!

Returns the value of current bytes loaded of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getBytesTotal():Number

Returns the value of total bytes loaded of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getCurrentTime():Number

Returns the current position in time of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getDuration():Number

Returns the current duration of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getStartBytes():Number

Returns the start bytes of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.setVolume(newVolume:Number):void

Sets the volume of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getVolume():Number

Returns the current volume of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.mute():void

Stores the current volume and changes the volume of the currently cued/loaded video to 0.

player.unmute():void

Returns the volume of the currently cued/loaded video to the last stored value when muted.

player.getEmbedCode():String

Returns the current YouTube embed code of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getVideoUrl():String

Returns the current YouTube video url of the currently cued/loaded video.

Events

YouTubeLoaderEvent.LOADED

Fired once the Chromeless Player has successfully completed loading and is ready to accept operations calls.

YouTubeLoaderEvent.STATE_CHANGE

Fired whenever the player’s state changes. The YouTubeLoader class translates the JavaScript API numbers to their related string values, the YouTubeLoaderEvent class stores the current event in a variable called state. Possible values are unstarted, ended, playing, paused, buffering, video cued. When the SWF is first loaded, it will broadcast an unstarted event. When the video is cued and ready to play, it will broadcast a video cued event.

YouTubeLoaderEvent.IO_ERROR

Fired when an error in the player occurs. There are two error codes possible: 100 is broadcasted when the video requested is not found. This occurs when a video has been removed (for any reason), or it has been marked as private. 101 is broadcasted when the video requested does not allow playback in the embedded players.

Another thing I am looking forward to soon (next week) that is missing from both Flash and Silverlight, is the ability to develop for the iPhone, which Unity3D is dropping the iPhone kit on Oct 22nd. Unity3D has effectively taken Director’s 3d game development (hardware accelerated) market lead away this year and late last year and is a great platform. Director who?

Lots of great tools and platforms to create the innovative new applications, games and markets that are so needed right now. Go create!

The sample Rostislav at Asual has, shows how you can incorporate SWFAddress now that the youtube player can be embedded by script, and thus how it can have deep-linking to sections of the video from the url.

So, today I spent some time trying to integrate SWFAddress with the sample YouTube video and the result is now available online. There were some tricky parts and probably the code can be encapsulated better, but overall I’m satisfied with the result. Every pause action or significant jump in the playback produces a deep link which will definitely make sense for long videos or specific scenarios. If you want to automatically start the video from the second verve just try this deep link. For this case I decided that it will be better to disable the generation of browser history and the SWFAddress strict mode.

The cool part about all this is is makes it extremely easy to add commenting at moments in time throughout youtube videos, enables deep-linking, allows snapshots of not just the flash application but also the video that might be playing in that chapter. This is done on services like viddler and others but now you can do it for youtube videos and this will also possibly start a standard way to do this across media players so that a platform of video commenting emerges.

The integration of SWFAddress is simple, on the normal onSWFAddressChange you just pass in the value to the seekTo call:

…but this is not very workable with the google video player, also you can always add this to other players but having this ability for youtube is a great leap in allowing a more integrated commenting, chapter and community like feel to video.

Since youtube is so big finally having some more control with the YouTubeAPI will allow much more great additions to the capabilities of using youtube video in many more ways and integration of more great javascript kits like SWFAddress.

The YouTube API is really quite useful. Here are some links of interest:

*drawlogic is authored by Ryan Christensen of *drawlabs and *drawcode, both dedicated to taking ideas to ship doing entertainment focused web, mobile and desktop game and interactive development projects.